Presently known voice-mail systems provide time scales displaying elapsed time of playout of one or more messages. Such scale indications enable a user of the system to reposition a replay function, and replay a portion of a message without having to replay and listen to all of the same message.
Other known voice-mail systems use speech recognition to convert audible messages to displayed/printed text.
Furthermore, the present state of the speech recognition arts allows for detection of small vocabularies of words (or expressions) in a "speaker independent" manner (i.e. independent of speaker accents, inflections, etc.).
However, we are presently unaware of the existence of voice-mail (or other record) replay systems which provide both a time scale of elapsed message playout time and additional symbolic indications; the latter alerting a user of the system instantaneously to locations in a message wherein words (or other expressions) in a limited specific vocabulary of words/expressions (or, even more generally, sound sequences) are spoken (or uttered). Such additional indications, as presently contemplated, would enable a user to take actions directed specifically to these symbolic indications.
For instance, the user could instantaneously stop playout, when one of these additional indications appears on the time scale, and later permit playout to continue, in order to allow time for the user to grasp the contextual significance of a spoken word (or term or expression) represented by the respective additional indication. As another example, an additional indication could be used to enable the user to replay a small portion of a message, containing the term represented by the respective indication, without having to play more of the message than the user actually needs or wants to hear.
We believe that a facility of this kind would be quite useful, and have directed the present invention to such.